Deep Down There

A couple of dear friends have already read what I'm posting today. Maybe this counts as cheating in the blog world, I'm not sure, since this was actually written a few months ago. But I want you to know where I have been, and in the moving forward, we will see his beauty. 

It's no secret to many of you that the past few months have been difficult, unbearably so at times. Praise God for his goodness, and for faithful friends willing to carry my burdens when my own arms felt far too weak.

In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis talks about the act of writing, how he doesn't know if all of the notebooks he has filled with his musings on grief have been worthwhile at all. But then he concludes that, if nothing else, writing has been "a defense against total collapse, a safety valve" and in that, it has served its purpose.

It has been the same with me. Really, truly, it has been exactly the same for me. And I'm so thankful for words, for a pen, and for the hope of God that reaches into the darkness and does not flinch.

So here is some of my journey, written in the midst of it all.

Image from here

Sometimes I think this in-between is a terrible place to be. It is not even tension, or time stretched out, an unraveled spool before me—it is just trapped. It is stuck. I am standing on this fault line, terrified to move, because what if my movement splits the earth wide open beneath me.

As much as I hate my present, it is the only place I can occupy without going insane. The past makes me want to disappear, and cry, and scream at the earth and everything on it. The future overwhelms me. It is daunting. I purse my lips against the hope, because hope is for the naïve, the foolish. So I am here, in this barren place, this in-between place, this wishing well, throwing in my pennies with the rest of them.

I keep hearing about glory, and I duck my head when they say the word, because dare I say it—if this is the glory of God, I want to hide from it. Not like Moses in the rock, because it is too great for me to behold, but like Jonah running from Nineveh, because surely there cannot be beauty, or even a hint of glory, in such a godless place.

He corrects me, though. He always does. I catch tremors of his beauty.

His breath in the trees, exhaling on me.

Chords, or words, that reach down and move me. I am a sucker for a well-turned phrase. Really,

I am. I find God there, in the words.

I read Wordsworth because he makes me cry, and he unties me.

I open the windows wide because I need the sun, I need the air—and maybe I was meant to be a fairy, living in the trees.

I turn Feist’s Let it Die up loud, really loud, because I swear she was sitting cross-legged on a rug in my head when she wrote that song.

I hold my daughter close, I watch her run, swinging her arms and shrieking with joy at the sight of a plane, a dog, that perfect little jagged rock she picks up to give me.

If anything is saving me right now, it is her.

I am Blake's hopeless man, closed up in my cavern, watching through those narrow chinks, catching glimpses of light. She is the one who draws me out, not because she is my God—but have you ever met a better ambassador of hope than a blooming child? If wonder is a virtue, and I believe it is, she possesses it in full measure, and I have much to learn.

Driving to work in the morning, it is always towards the hills, and I can't help but think thoughts of climbing, of overcoming, of standing. I can't help but want to reach the top of those hills, and look out over the expanse, declaring that I knew it all along—that of course it would work out for my good.

Of course, I haven't known it all along. I have my moments. Most of them are paralyzing. But some of them, when he presses his forehead to mine, catches the shimmer in my eyes, that is down there (deep down there), and declares promise over me—in those moments, I am a bird taking flight, and I close my eyes against the brilliance of sight.

I wish I could say there are more of those moments than there are. They sustain me. They keep me going. He knows how much I need.

I bow my head, I close my eyes, I fold my hands like a good Sunday school girl. I tell her we need to thank Jesus, even when we don’t want to thank him, even if it is just for each other, because everything else has crumbled, but I have you, sweet girl, I have you.

She runs away. She knows nothing of sitting still, of hand folding and head bowing. I ask her to sit beside me. She shakes her head—no—I don’t want to sit down. I want to keep moving. And if I am sitting there next to you, I cannot move.

She is revelation. If she moves, I must move. And if I move, he must move.

This is the moving forward. This is the wonder.

A Step Out

Ten years after writing it, I still remember the first words of my college entrance essay—I have always defined myself as a writer. I scribbled those words, and the rest of my essay, onto a single sheet of notebook paper, during my junior year of high school. Growing up, I had changing career interests—lawyer, archaeologist, teacher, philosopher—and yet always, even as a grade school girl hanging upside-down on the monkey bars, I was writer. It has been how I've made sense of my world, how I comprehended not only others, but myself. I wrote at my small desk before bed, in the car, staring out my bedroom window that looked onto the street, about the man picking up his mail in the afternoon sun.

The summer before I started junior-high, I began to work on my first book. I still have those spiral notebooks, a stack of them about a foot high, covered from edge to edge with my frenzied handwriting. Nearly every day after school, I would grab my pencil and paper, sprawl out on my parent’s bed, and write until my hand got tired. I remember those characters very well, even now. They were friends. I spent hours creating them, unmasking them, imagining their universes.

My relationship with writing changed when I entered tenth grade. I was taking difficult classes; school began to consume most of my time. Now, I wrote for academic purposes. I had a social life, a boyfriend, and there wasn’t as much time to devote to fiction, to journaling, to poetry. Sure, I was still a writer. According to a couple of my teachers, a decent one. I carried around my pens and my small notebooks, I observed. I read a lot. But I no longer rushed home to write. I rushed home to do homework, to talk on the phone, to plan time with my friends and boyfriend.

I never finished my book. I started others, finished a few short stories, wrote a lot of essays. I went to college, wrote even more essays, forgot about my fiction, but filled journals.

I am still a writer. I cannot comprehend the world around me apart from this. I lose sight of myself when I do not write. My relationship with this craft has changed, evolved, in good and bad ways. I am guilty of comparing myself, of sitting frozen with a pen in my hand, unable to get even a word out because of the fear, the fear, the fear. It is a feeling that I never experienced in those early years.

Perhaps it is like this with all of us. This is a fraught relationship. How can it not be? We straddle the line between solitude and involvement with the worlds we occupy. I love people, but writing is a lonely thing. Because in the end, it is you and your pen, you and your screen, and all of a sudden you are face to face with yourself. No one can do this for you. Sometimes writing is a friend, and sometimes she feels like a cruel adversary, ripping down our defenses, exposing our insecurities, our fear of being alone, the terrible inadequacy of our words. And there is the presumptuousness. Why do I feel all of this anyway? It’s not like I’m even any good.

I have renounced the pen. I have picked it up again. I have fled because I cannot be anything but honest here, and I was desperate to hide from my own reflection. I have realized that my world made no sense without this, that I was lost because to not articulate, to not give in to my love of words, was to commit a crime against my conscience, against my own well-being. I am alive here. And regardless of if I am any good or not, regardless of if anyone ever reads these words, or even likes or understands them—I am alive here. And if the glory of God is man fully alive, then I must write.

This little blog, this tiny corner of a huge web, is my attempt to rekindle what I lost as I matured, grew up, grew in to this craft. Yes, I am probably a better writer now than I was at twelve. But I am more fearful. And even now, as I type this, I am thinking of all of the other writers, and how much better they are, and how futile this is, because who really cares what I have to say?

But I have learned that the best way to overcome an insecurity is to call it forth, look it in the eye, and prove it wrong by doing just the thing it has whispered is not possible.

So here I am, feeling vulnerable and exposed. But alive. Achingly, shockingly alive. Because there is nothing like fresh air on bare skin, and yes, yes Lord, I welcome the sting.